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Xandu writes "BLAST, the
Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, was launched
on the 11th at 11:09 UTC from
Esrange in northern Sweden, and
is currently floating over Greenland. BLAST is a
2700kg telescope
with a 2 meter primary mirror that hangs from a 1.1 million m^3 balloon floating at an
altitude of 38km that will study the star formation history of the universe.
It will float west at nearly constant latitude for about 5 days
before the flight is terminated over northwest Canada or northern Alaska. Real
time position and
flight track is available from the NSBF.
Two of the graduate students working on the project have
photoblogs
of the entire (8 week) prep period, including several launch photos. The
presshasmore
traditional coverage as well.
And if that isn't geeky enough to make it on Slashdot, the flight computers
run Slack."

This is a fine example that sometimes a balloon mission is the most ideal for launching scientific mission.

(1) it costs less to launch the observing platform;(2) the structural tolerance to vibration isn't important;(3) the instrument can be recovered and reused (after some repairing...even a soft landing can break something)......etc, etc. It's hard to overrun the cost for $1billion dollars for a mission like this (yeah, take that, JWST!).